The Pitmen Painters' Ian Kelly on the life of an actor & writer
Ian Kelly, currently appearing in the return of The Pitmen Painters, is also a writer and historical biographer. His most recent work, a major revisionist and theatrical take on the famous 18th century libertine Giacomo Casanova, is The Sunday Times Biography of the Year. It was written during the rehearsals and devising of The Pitmen Painters in Newcastle in 2007. Ian Kelly reflects on the connections between biography, acting...and Casanova.
'The theatre' wrote Casanova ‘is the best place from which to understand the world'
I wasn't intending to take any acting work in the final countdown to the deadline on Casanova late in 2007. Often in the past I have juggled writing and acting commitments. In fact they can often complement each other. I get quite lonely writing, not to mention researching - though I love both. Sometimes on practical levels the two careers can dovetail: the Russian research on the Casanova book for instance was underwritten by a small role in a Russian epic about the Bolshevik Revolution. Some days I can get a lot of writing done whilst on set or in dressing rooms - and my writing too I hope informs closely my acting.
My ideal day would involve some hours spent in a library and then an evening spent on stage or in the company of actors: nothing, nowhere and no one better. That much, indeed, Giacomo Casanova and I have had in common. He was born in 1725 into a family of actors, comedians and dancers and spent his whole life in the company of other itinerant Venetian theatricals all over Europe. Many of his lovers were opera singers, actresses or musicians. More to the point, one of the main reasons for writing about him now, and my writing about him in the first place, was to put him in the shifting lights and new perspectives made possible by fresh evidence and central to all of this was my placing him back where I knew he belonged: in the theatre and in the convention of actors-who-write. So when the script for The Pitmen Painters landed on my desk - (or rather the first half of it, for that was all there was to begin with) it presented something of a quandary. On the one hand, I had promised myself, my literary agent and my publishers that I would meet a tight deadline and eschew the stage for a while. On the other hand, The Pitmen Painters was - and is - cocking brilliant...a work of warmth, wit and wisdom by a major voice in British drama who also happens to be one of my oldest friends: Lee Hall.
In the end, of course, the idea of writing, or rather finishing Casanova, the book about the theatre and about an actor who writes, whilst working in the theatre myself..well it all seemed too perfectly circular...
Which is why the research notes from the archives I had visited from Venice to St Petersburg to the Vatican were corralled into the final chapters of the book - bizarrely enough - in the dressing rooms at Newcastle's Live Theatre (18th century almshouses as it happens - Casanova would approve), in the atmospheric Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle, and between conversations with Lee and with Max Roberts, the director, on the associated biographical-theatrical business of bringing to the stage the real historical characters of The Pitmen Painters.
The resonances between writing - biography writing in particular - and acting are compelling. Exercises in empathy, in rendering research into human and narrative structures, illuminating ideas - one would hope - by the inspiration of voice, heart and humour or finding person-shaped keyholes into other worlds, other eras; these are constant aspirations that juncture these parallel tracks. Casanova himself spent all his life attempting to be taken seriously as a writer. He never was. To come from the theatre in the 18th century positioned Casanova in his own lifetime at the centre of his culture as both the plaything and playmate of kings, but at one and the same devoid of respectability; derided and dismissed. No one from the theatre, then, could be taken seriously or hold their head up high in society, for all the great writers of the age borrowed heavily from stage comedy, rhetoric and psychological insight. The irony might not be lost then on Casanova that his monumental posthumous fame has been achieved in the modern era - a result of the gradual publication between the mid 19th century and the present day of his encyclopaedic writings on 18th century life - only at the price, again, of his respectability. He is known only for his (monumental) sex life. What makes him so compelling as a writer, and a subject for a biography, is that he lived at this divided place in the first great anonymous cities and was alive to a compellingly modern - and utterly actorly - idea; that we are all performers and masqueraders; that there is a mask, but always something more interesting behind it.
Ian Kelly talks about Casanova in a platform on 4 February at 6pm
Casanova is available to buy from the NT Bookshop
The Pitmen Painters runs in repertoire in the Lyttelton until 14 April.
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